Julianne Moore wins best actress at Cannes

Julianne Moore won the best actress prize at the 67th Cannes Film Festival today for her role as a shallow starlet in Canadian director David Cronenberg's biting Hollywood satire "Maps to the Stars".

In the film, the 53-year-old redhead plays an ageing actress feeling increasingly sidelined by an industry obsessed with youth.

When the young son of a rival for new film role is killed in a freak drowning accident, Moore does a dance of joy that remained one of the enduring shocks of this year's festival.

"Vive Los Angeles, Vive David Cronenberg, vive Julie Moore et vive la France," the film's screenwriter, Bruce Wagner, said as he picked up the trophy for Moore, who was not in Cannes.

Moore has played everything from a porn star to an FBI agent over a two-decade big screen career that has already brought four Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes and a Primetime Emmy to her name.

Her best-known films include 1998's "The Big Lebowski," "Crazy Stupid Love" (2011) as well as "The Hours" and "Far From Heaven," both from 2002.

Those last two helped her join the elite club of actors to score two Oscar nominations for different films in the same year. She also scored Academy Award nods for "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "The End of the Affair" (1999).

Moore won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for portraying Sarah Palin in 2012's "Game Change," about Republican John McCain's doomed 2008 White House run with the former Alaska governor as his gaffe-prone running mate.

Born Julie Ann Smith in December 1960 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Moore lived in 23 different cities during her childhood and adolescence thanks to her father's job as a military judge.

While her dad wanted his daughter to become a doctor or a lawyer, Moore took a degree in drama at Boston University and then headed for New York, where she launched into a career in theatre and television.

Her first big screen role came in 1990's "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie," but it wasn't until three years later that she shot to fame with minor roles in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" and "The Fugitive" with Harrison Ford.

Later she worked with Louis Malle in the 1994 movie "Vanya on 42nd Street", then with Steven Spielberg in "Lost World" (1997) and with Paul Thomas Anderson in the successful "Boogie Nights" (1997), where her role as a porn actress won her her first supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Since then she has confirmed herself as one of only a handful of actresses who can make the transition comfortably between commercial cinema and art house.